Zingtree Tags: decision tree generator

Decision trees are an amazing, interactive tool for guiding customers toward a likely solution to their problem, or answer to their question. Building troubleshooter-style trees for your visitors that are customized with your brand in mind is a great way to solve problems and make customers more satisfied.

We’ve helped a lot of small businesses, large companies and even solo entrepreneurs set up helpful decision trees that are efficient and effective. Take a look at some of our top tips for building the absolute best decision tree troubleshooter possible.

Write your questions like a person would read them.

Within a troubleshooting – or otherwise more technical – decision tree, it might seem like a good plan to lay things out as specifically as you possibly can. However, using a more natural style of language makes it much easier for the average person to understand the process at hand.

One helpful thing to do is to take a step back and think about how someone you know might read through your decision tree. Would your father, your neighbor or your aunt understand what you’re saying? This can often be a good benchmark for writing content within your tree.

Use visuals and videos when appropriate.

We’ve found that there is nothing more effective than adding a short and sweet how-to, tutorial or guide video to make your point with less text. Using visuals like photos, graphics and GIFs, and adding relevant videos to your decision tree nodes is a great way to communicate a lot within a little space.

Along with providing more clear instructions or information to your users, using visuals, videos and other customizations is a great way to extend your brand and make a good impression on customers.

Take advantage of existing tools to work out the complexities.

Some decision tree troubleshooters can be larger projects to assemble than others. If you have a complex tree to build, a good tip is to prepare more than one at the same time. By containing elements in different decision trees — called sub-trees — and then linking them up into one final decision tree later, you can concentrate on one piece at a time.

When you’re mapping out your decision tree troubleshooter, you’re bound to run into a hiccup or two. If you need to connect two nodes together and get stumped, you can create a plain, undefined placeholder node to help you continue through the process; you can always go back in later and fix it up!

Grab your data before moving forward.

It’s a best practice in any industry to collect data, and analyze it, before making any next steps in a project. Without understanding the stats behind how your troubleshooter is used, you won’t be able to make it better.

With Scoring Nodes, you can A/B test different messages, structures and offers to see which performs the best, and then optimize accordingly. Additionally, you can receive direct feedback from end-users using comments, as well as always keep track of the activity and health of your decision trees with in-depth Analytics & Reporting features.

Zingtree makes it easy to build completely custom, data-gathering question & answer style troubleshooters to satisfy your customers (and your business). Contact us to learn more or get started today!